How to Sell on the ONDC Network: 7 Steps + Real Costs

One of our sellers signed up at 10:26 at night. He finished his KYC by 11:32. By about 1:40 the next morning his shop was live on the ONDC Network with a full catalogue.

He had no website. He had no technical person. He had a shop, a phone, and his documents in a plastic folder.

I am writing this page because most guides about selling on the ONDC Network are either three years out of date or written for companies with a compliance department. This one comes from the inside — we run a Seller App in the ONDC Network, so every step below is a screen we actually built, and every timing is a number from our own records.

Read it once, top to bottom. Then keep it open while you do the steps.

What does “selling on the ONDC Network” actually mean?

ONDC is not a shopping app. You will never find an “ONDC app” on the Play Store, and buyers do not search for you “on ONDC”.

Think of UPI. UPI is not an app — it is the rails underneath. You use one app, your customer uses another, and the money still moves. ONDC does the same thing for shopping. Different apps, one network.

There are four parts, and that is all:

• The buyer — a person shopping on some app on their phone.
• The buyer app — the app they shop on. It brings the customers.
• The gateway — the network’s post office. It carries a buyer’s search out to every seller side at once.
• The Seller App — the software that holds your shop, prices, stock and orders, and answers the network on your behalf. Kaarobari is a Seller App in the ONDC Network.

📊 How the network is wired

So the real question is never “how do I register with ONDC”. It is “which Seller App do I join, and what do they charge me?” Everything on this page follows from that.

One consequence people miss: because the buyer app is a separate company from your Seller App, your shop can appear in several buyer apps at once without you doing anything extra. You upload a product once. Whichever buyer apps crawl your catalogue can show it.

Who can sell on the ONDC Network?

Almost any real business with a real bank account. Kirana shops. Home kitchens making pickles and papad. A bachat gat selling handmade soap. Garment shops, medical stores, hardware, stationery, agarbatti makers.

Three real conditions:

1. You are a genuine business with goods to sell — not someone reselling another person’s account.
2. You have a PAN and a bank account you can receive money into.
3. You have one tax identity — either a GSTIN, or the free GST enrolment number for unregistered small sellers.

The third one is where most people stop reading and give up. Do not.

You do not need GST to start. Since 1 October 2023 an unregistered small seller can take a free GST enrolment number from gst.gov.in and sell online legally. No monthly returns, no accountant, no fee. We built a separate no-GST path into our KYC because so many of our sellers arrive by this route.

One honest condition comes attached, and it decides your whole plan, so read it before deciding anything else: an enrolment-number seller can sell only inside their own state. An order from another state is refused by the network automatically, silently, before it ever reaches your dashboard. We have watched this happen to real orders on our own servers.

If that limit does not suit you, take a GSTIN instead. Since the simplified registration went live on 1 November 2025, a small low-risk seller gets a GSTIN in about three working days — not the month everyone fears.

Detail on both routes: sell online without GST. The state rule in depth: the one catch nobody tells you. The step-by-step for the no-GST route: ONDC seller registration without GST.

📊 Which route is yours?

What documents do I need before I start?

Four things for every seller, plus one or two depending on your route. Nobody will ask you for a shop licence, a CA letter, or anything notarised.

Take clear phone photos of all of them before you begin. That one habit is the difference between finishing in a single sitting and losing a week.

Files upload as JPG, PNG or PDF, up to 5 MB each. All of it can be done from the phone in your hand.

A small mercy worth knowing: for bank details you type the account number and IFSC. A passbook or cheque photo is welcome but not blocking — we removed that block after watching sellers get stuck at the last screen hunting for a cheque book.

One document has a real waiting period: FSSAI, roughly 7 to 30 days. If you sell food, apply for it on day one and do everything else while it processes.

The full explainer, with what each document is for and every official link: seller documents.

How do I register? The 7 steps, in order

📊 The seven steps, with real timings

Step 1 — Choose your tax identity (15–20 minutes)

Use the tree above, then go and get the number. If you are taking the no-GST route, do your free Udyam registration in the same sitting — it is the government’s MSME registration, about fifteen minutes with Aadhaar and PAN, and it unlocks government schemes for your shop later.

Write both numbers down somewhere safe. You will type them, not upload them.

Step 2 — Get your documents ready (30 minutes)

Three photos: PAN, Aadhaar front, Aadhaar back. Good light, all four corners inside the frame, no thumb across the numbers. Keep your account number and IFSC next to you.

Step 3 — Sign up on a Seller App (about 5 minutes)

On Kaarobari, signup is three screens:

1. Your mobile number.
2. The 6-digit OTP we send you (valid 15 minutes).
3. Your shop details — your name as printed on your PAN, business name, shop name, shop PIN code, how far you want to deliver, your GST status, your Udyam number if you have one, and a password.

No card, no deposit, nothing to pay. There is no monthly fee, so there is nothing to charge you for at signup.

Step 4 — Finish KYC (under 5 minutes to fill; 1–2 business days to review)

Five steps, in this order:

📊 What the KYC wizard looks like at submit

Most sellers finish filling this in under five minutes. Then a human on our compliance team checks it. The estimate we show on the screen, and the one we hold ourselves to, is 1 to 2 business days.

Step 5 — Set up your store (15 minutes)

Most guides skip this step. It is the one that decides whether buyers ever see you. Four short screens:

• Branding — logo, banner, customer care phone and email, and a description of your business in your own words. This is what buyers read about you on every buyer app.
• Hours — your weekly opening and closing times, plus holidays. Buyers can only order while your store is open. Be honest here: a shop that shows “open” at 2 AM and does not respond gets marked down by the network.
• Settings — drop a pin on the map where your shop actually stands, and choose what buyers may do with an order (returns, cancellations).
• Delivery — how orders reach the buyer. See the delivery section below.

Step 6 — Add your products (30 minutes for a small catalogue)

Add products one at a time from a form, or many at once from a spreadsheet. Each product needs photos, the MRP, your selling price, the category, and the declarations the law requires on a packaged product. New listings are reviewed by our team, normally within 24 hours.

Never price above MRP. It is an offence under packaging law and the fastest way to earn a complaint.

Step 7 — Go live, then wait for the night (same night)

Once your KYC is approved and your catalogue is in, your shop goes out to the network. Then comes the part that catches everybody. It needs its own section.

How long before my first order comes?

Here is an uncomfortable fact no other guide will tell you: your products will not appear on buyer apps the moment you press save.

Buyer apps do not watch your catalogue live. They crawl seller catalogues on their own schedule. In our own logs those crawls cluster late at night, roughly between 1 AM and 3 AM. After an app crawls you, your products usually appear on its storefront within 4 to 30 minutes.

There is also a rule buried in the network’s technical contract that surprises everyone: the small incremental updates flowing during the day cannot introduce a brand-new shop. A buyer app has to run a full crawl before your shop exists for it at all.

So:

• Listed at 4 PM, nothing visible at 6 PM? Normal. Check tomorrow morning.
• A new product on a shop that is already visible? Usually faster, but the same night-crawl logic can apply per app.

📊 One day on the network

This is why the seller in the opening story went live at 1:40 in the morning. Nothing special happened at 1:40. That is simply when the network’s night shift runs. His KYC was cleared the same evening because we were watching the queue; the normal estimate stays 1 to 2 business days.

The first order runs on a different clock again. It depends on your category, your prices, your area, and above all on whether your listing survives the filters described further down. Some sellers get an order in the first week. Some take longer. Anybody who promises you a number is guessing.

If nothing appears after two nights, work through why your listing is not showing. Six silent filters, and none of them shows you an error message.

What does it actually cost to sell on the ONDC Network?

Every government step above is free. Udyam is free. The GST enrolment number is free. The e-PAN is free. Only FSSAI has a real fee, and it starts around ₹100 a year.

Our own charge is one number: no monthly fee, no listing fee, no setup cost — 2% only on delivered orders.

Read the sentence slowly, because each word is doing work:

• “Delivered” — not placed, not shipped. A cancelled or returned order carries no fee.
• “Only” — there is no monthly bill waiting for you in a slow month. A month with no delivered orders costs you nothing.
• “No listing fee” — five products or five hundred, the same price: nothing.

Now the part honest sellers deserve and most pages hide: our 2% is not the only line on the order. The buyer app that brought you the customer charges its own fee, usually in the 2–4% range, and the network caps what it may charge by category. Two tax deductions also happen at source: TCS at 0.5% under section 52 of the GST law and TDS at 0.1% under section 194-O of the Income Tax Act. Those two are not costs in the ordinary sense. You claim TCS back in your GST return and adjust TDS in your income-tax return.

Every one of those lines is printed on the order screen before any money moves. Our 2% is the only piece we keep.

Full rate card: pricing.

When and how do I get paid?

Money for an order goes to the bank account you gave during KYC.

The chain is worth understanding, because it explains the wait. The buyer app collects the buyer’s money and holds it for a short period. It then releases the amount to us under the ONDC settlement process. We check it and pay it into your bank account. Right now every payout is reviewed and released by hand at our end. That is slower than an automatic transfer, and deliberate while volumes are small, because it means there is always a person who can answer “where is my money”.

On the order screen you see the whole break-up before anything is paid: what the buyer paid, the buyer app’s fee, TDS, TCS, our 2%, and what lands in your account. Each settled order carries its bank UTR number, so you can match it against your passbook line by line.

That is the principle we care about most: you should never see a number at payout that you did not already see on the order.

📊 The order break-up you see before payout

The full payment cycle, what TDS and TCS mean for your returns, and when the money actually lands has its own guide: ONDC settlement — when do sellers get paid.

Who delivers the order?

This is the question shopkeepers ask before fees, before documents, before anything else: “Order aa gaya — phir deliver kaun karega?”

Two paths, and both are proper ways to sell on the network.

You pick this in your delivery settings and you can change it later. You never sign a courier contract yourself, and you are never forced off a courier you already trust.

For a kirana or a fresh-food shop serving its own neighbourhood, self delivery is usually simpler and cheaper than anything else. The order comes in, your own person takes it, and it is done before a courier would have finished the pickup scan.

What actually decides whether you get orders?

Here is where I will go further than the guides that stop at “sign up and start selling”.

It is not effort, and it is not luck. It is whether your product data is complete enough to survive the trip out to the buyer apps.

Here is the mechanism, and it is the part almost nobody tells shopkeepers. Before your catalogue goes out on the network, every item is checked for the declarations that packaging law requires: manufacturer name and address, net quantity, MRP, date of packing, consumer care details. An item missing any one of them is dropped from the catalogue we publish. It does not go out broken. It simply does not go out.

And nothing tells you. No error, no bounce, no red mark anywhere on your screen. The item sits in your dashboard looking perfectly listed, and no buyer app ever receives it. A shop can spend a month like this — adding products, refreshing the orders page, wondering why it is so quiet — while a part of its shelf never reached the network at all.

The fix costs nothing but typing. Fill the missing declarations, push the catalogue again, and the item goes out with the next crawl. This is why we now show the exact missing field on the exact item, instead of letting it disappear quietly.

In order of how much they matter:

📊 What survives the trip to a buyer app

1. Complete legal declarations on every packaged product. The only one on this list that can remove an item from the network without telling you.
2. A delivery radius that matches the market you actually want. Buyer apps filter on it before they show you to anyone. A radius set too small makes your shop invisible outside a tiny circle, with no error anywhere.
3. Photos and product attributes. Four or more images, front and back. Where a legal declaration is printed on the packet, it must be readable in the photo.
4. Honest stock and honest hours. Cancelling orders you cannot fulfil hurts your standing on the network’s own scorecard.
5. Price at or below MRP, always.

How is this different from selling on a big marketplace?

I will not name competitors. The structural differences are enough.

The honest counterweight: a big marketplace already has crores of shoppers walking through its doors, and the ONDC Network is younger. What you get here is the terms, the control and the cost structure. What you should not expect is somebody else’s traffic on day one.

The mistakes that cost sellers the most

Not a list of tips. These are the five things we actually watch go wrong.

1. 1Registering with an enrolment number, then expecting all-India sales — out-of-state orders are refused silently. Choose the route with open eyes.
2. 2Skipping the legal declarations to add products fast — an incomplete item is dropped before it is ever published, and you get no warning.
3. 3Applying for FSSAI last — it is the one document with a real waiting period. Do it first.
4. 4Paying an agent for Udyam or the GST enrolment number — both are free on the government portals.
5. 5Judging the network in 48 hours — between the night crawl and each buyer app's own schedule, give it at least two nights.

FAQ

Read next

Sources & official links

• GST e-Enrolment for unregistered persons — gst.gov.in (free; the only official source)
• Udyam / MSME registration — udyamregistration.gov.in (free; avoid the paid lookalikes)
• FSSAI for food sellers — foscos.fssai.gov.in
• ONDC Network official resources and the public participant directory — resources.ondc.org and ondc.org

Kaarobari is a Seller App in the ONDC Network, operated by NEXSOL INFOTECH PVT LTD, Dhule, Maharashtra. The first-hand facts in this guide — the signup-to-live night timeline, the way incomplete items are dropped before publishing, the 1 AM to 3 AM crawl window, and the fee arithmetic — come from how our own software works, August 2026.